Friends of a 15-year-old boy stabbed to death as he cycled in north London today called on young people to “stop the killing” and lay down their knives.

City Spy: Off-message at Morgan Stanley

Winter winner? Team GB speed-skater Elise Christie

Published: 23 August 2013

Updated: 12:04, 23 August 2013

Over on the Street of Dreams, investment banking palms are getting sweaty as the day of Twitter’s $10 billion (£6.4 billion) stock-market launch in the US gets nearer.

Twitter’s management has reportedly met up with the bankers in recent weeks ahead of a formal beauty parade to pick the lead underwriters. Among the contenders said to be sniffing around the lucrative offering are JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, Credit Suisse and — wait for it — Morgan Stanley.

Yes, that would be the Morgan Stanley that tarnished its credentials by messing up the Facebook float last year. Spy suspects that Morgan Stanley supremo James Gorman isn’t holding his breath over landing this one.

* Tasteless PR cash-in from lawyer Slater & Gordon after the death of Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern Moritz Erhardt. “We are lucky in the UK to have strict rules about how long workers should spend at work,” it says. Of course no lawyers have ever pulled an all-nighter.

Bloomberg in the wars again

Bloomberg’s review of its journalistic practices by editor at large Clark Hoyt is the gift that keeps on giving as he took the newswire to task for comparing JPMorgan — which unsurprisingly complained — to Nazis.

The florid report says 33,000 residents of Cassino were “digging out from the rubble left by Wall Street” six decades after US forces won a bloody battle for the town. Bloomberg “stood by its story” but Hoyt concluded in deadpan fashion: “To suggest that a bond deal gone sour, curtailing daycare for 60 children and services for the poor is comparable to the terror and cataclysm of war is inconsistent with Bloomberg News’s high standards.”

* Spy’s award for brass neck goes to Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie, who warns that “borrowing continues to be way off track”. Not quite as off track as the £155 billion that was reached under the last Government in 2009.

But what will the well-dressed cutters and fitters at Oliver Brown make of the tracksuit and trainer-clad athletes?

Owner and creative director Kristian Robson should be able to handle it — Oliver Brown has a history dressing sporting occasions — and is the only trader inside the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot, so has witnessed all manner of outfits and styles...

And the winner in bank audit switch is... RBS

Who is the big winner over HSBC’s decision to dump KPMG as auditor?

Given that this is the country’s most lucrative audit work, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the answer would be KPMG’s replacement, PricewaterhouseCoopers. But, in a rare piece of good news for the most state-owned bank, it could well turn out to be Royal Bank of Scotland.

About 1000 PwC staff are now barred from holding any financial products, be they life insurance or savings accounts, with Lloyds, Barclays and now HSBC because the firm audits all three, and needs to avoid any conflicts of interest. As a result, these 1000 are rushing to bank with RBS and Santander.

* Talking of accountants, if the Big Four end up getting bashed by the EU, they can blame a pair of sad civil servants in Lithuania. The EU is struggling to push through massive reforms of the audit market, which would totally undermine the way KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY go about their business, ahead of a deadline next year. Lithuania currently holds the EU presidency and these two civil servants asked for, and received, special permission to work on the reforms through the EU’s traditional summer break.